Month: March 2022

CRIME DOES NOT PAY, NOR SHOULD IT SEEM TO

In three words I can summarise everything I’ve learnt about life – it goes on. –Poet Robert Frost.

Najib Razak would, no doubt, agree.

Malaysia’s First Felon, affectionately known in high society criminal circlers as Fearless Leader, has been fearlessly dishing out advice left, right and centre – and people are taking heed, it seems.

Indeed, he’s morphed into a latter-day Svengali to the United Malays National Organisation, the party he once headed. Fearless is, to be sure, the Boss-Who-Needn’t-Feel-Any-Shame-at-All.

And he doesn’t, not a jot.

Even so, the shameless ex-boss continues to be deferred to as a leader. Nowhere was this more evident than in a recent video showing the party faithful celebrating its win in the recent Johor state election: it showed party president Zahid Hamidi elbowing Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob aside to bring Fearless up-front, to the head of the throng.

It’s no wonder Ismail’s been looking especially doleful of late.

As I write this, I read, with astonishment, that Fearless just concluded a keynote address to the Penang International Business and Investment Summit.

The report went on to say that during his “two-day trip” to Penang, Fearless was expected “to meet the Chinese community” and “the state Umno liaison committee.”

Ye Gods! Who invites a person found guilty of defrauding his country to launch an “international business and investment” seminar?

That’s like inviting Bernie Madoff to launch a Rotary business event in, say, Seremban. Let’s face it, on the Jho Low Scale of Mammoth Larceny, Madoff is a minnow to Fearless’ whale.

Meanwhile, why is Fearless being lauded about, and bowed and scraped to, as if he were leading his party into the next general election?

Do they know something we don’t?

The absurdity of it all is made preposterous by the testimony coming out of a Brooklyn courtroom. It stars Felonious, Fearless’ less-than-trusty sidekick and co-stars greedy bankers and everyone else who fed at the 1MDB trough. Their numbers, to quote the Bible, are “legion.”

By all accounts, Felonious was the mastermind and the biggest thief of the lot. But he could not have pulled it off without help from the top.

How did Fatboy convince everybody, even people already rich as Croesus, to participate in a grand plan to loot an entire country? The US trial in Brooklyn was told that the rotund robber siphoned US$4.5 billion (RM18.9 billion) of 1MDB’s money into his own account.

Fearless has been convicted of only one crime that involved a sum of RM42 million which is peanuts in terms of Felonious’ colossal theft. But it sets the stage. His big trials are ongoing and he has a lot to answer for.

Which is why it is sheer lunacy to continue to fete Fearless, to extol him and assure him he needn’t feel shame. To do so would be to exonerate him. Even worse, it’s a tacit nod towards corruption, even its encouragement, so long as the loot is shared.

1MDB was and remains the largest theft in the history of white-collar crime. That is an absolute fact and no amount of dissembling, artifice, advice or keynote speeches at investment seminars can diminish its magnitude.

The Appeals Court described him as “a national embarrassment.”

There is also that.

ENDS

ALL DISQUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. – Albert Einstein

I hate reality. Nevertheless, it’s still the only place to get a good steak. – Woody Allen

It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets worse.

It’s a sentiment first echoed by the madcap comedienne, Lily Tomlin. And in these circumstances, it’s apt.

Don’t you think so?

Europe is having its first war since World War Two, a fact not lost on anyone remotely aware of history. If this was a film, all sorts of ominous chords would be rumbling in the background.

The worry is best summed up by Einstein after the Americans used the atomic bomb to end WW2. “I know not what weapons will be used in World War Three but in World War 1V, it will be by way of sticks and stones.”

People like Einstein felt these things because they knew American society. It is a society that’s getting increasingly divided, ugly and violent.

It used to have people like Rush Limbaugh, a radio talk-show host who was so right of centre that Attila the Hun would have crossed the street rather than accost him.

More to the point, Limbaugh wasn’t dismissed as a kook, a weirdo or a loony as he should have been. On the contrary, he was listened to gravely, had an enormous following, and was even awarded America’s highest civilian honour by President “Weird Don” Trump.

And all this for a man who once advised his audience over the airwaves: “The best way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons is to use them.” That wasn’t thinking out of the box, it was strictly out of the straitjacket.

But few seemed to think it mad, least of all a Fox news anchor who, upon Limbaugh’s death in 2021, described him admiringly as “a force of nature.”

So are earthquakes but they are never given awards nor described admiringly.

The point is the Limbaughs of the world are legion and scattered all over, from Moscow to Madras, from Chernobyl to Cambridge. Extremism is rising and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that what starts off as a local conflict can escalate out of hand.

The way Putin is behaving is unnerving. And you get more worried when you hear, over the BBC, that Western intelligence, thinks he’s feeling “increasingly angry, frustrated and isolated.”

That’s not something you want to know about a guy with easy access to the N-button. Let’s hope “hell hath no fury like a tyrant scorned” isn’t anything more than an exaggerated literary flourish.

The conflict is already affecting us. Our finance minister expects to spend almost RM28 billion on fuel subsidies – extremely idiotic policy given it’s the Mercedes and the BMWs that’ll benefit the most.

But like-minded people will be worrying about the Johor polls where Umno has already got its Three Rules ready…

  1. Get elected (2013)
  2. Get re-elected (2022)
  3. Don’t get mad, get even

ENDS

JUST WHEN YOU THINK IT CAN’T GET ANY WORSE, IT CAN

It’s generally been a depressing week, don’t you think?

George Carlin was right all along: how, on God’s green earth, can any war be civil? And amid a still-raging pandemic?

I read, with mounting disbelief, that Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and the largest in Europe, was on fire early Friday after an attack by Russian troops.

Are they out of their minds?

Even Vladimir “Stoneface” Putin must know there are no winners in that kind of war. In the words of Bertrand Russell, it’s either “co-existence or no existence.” In those circumstances, all men are truly cremated equal.
Against that hellish backdrop, the banality, and continuing dishonesty, of Malaysian politics comes across as almost refreshing, a bit of comic relief in an otherwise grim world.

The nation’s First Felon, the peerless, Fearless Leader once again demonstrated his prodigious ability to perplex by telling Parliament Wednesday that the government had yet to pay “a single cent” of the principal debt of 1MDB, the sovereign wealth fund that Fearless set up and, subsequently, crippled through the sheer weight of its own debt.

He was attempting to show that taxpayers hadn’t been injured in the slightest. You have to admire the man’s gift for being disingenuous.

It is true that the principal amount of 1MDB’s debt (RM32 billion) hasn’t changed but it’s only because the bonds issued by 1MDB – to buy unnecessary assets at inflated prices – aren’t due yet. Since its inception in 2009, taxpayers have repaid over RM13 billion of 1MDB’s debt with another RM38-odd billion to go.

The latter will become due starting May and will have to be serviced by the taxpayer until 2039. Malaysia’s total national debt is over RM1 trillion.

Blessed are the children for they shall inherit the national debt. The sentiment was Herbert Hoover’s and he was the US President widely credited with exacerbating the Great Depression of the 20th Century.

In a backhanded sort of way, it makes me glad that I’m over 65.

Meanwhile, the bells of judgment have begun tolling for Fearless. Having been found guilty by both the High Court and the Court of Appeal, Fearless had desperately tried to delay matters by attempting to claim “new evidence”.

The hope was extinguished Wednesday when the country’s apex court rejected any more postponements. And so Fearless’ final throw of the dice will take place March 16-18.

If he loses there, he can no longer “pass Go nor collect $200”. Instead, he will have to “proceed directly” to jail to begin serving a 12-year sentence. There, he won’t have police outriders or bodyguards. Nor is he likely to expect the adoring throngs, with their raucous cries of “Bossku” (My Boss) any time soon.

He will have to get used to new dietary conditions, new clothes, an out-of- parliament experience and grimmer accommodation than he’s accustomed to. His pensions are also likely to be axed.

On the plus side, he will still get to go out from time to time: Fearless still faces very serious charges in several remaining trials.

From somewhere deep in Macao, Jho “Felonious” Low watched the plight of his once-trusted friend and helpmate with all the sympathy a bottle of ice-cold Moet & Chandon Esprit du Siècle Brut can summon.

The sympathy was considerable but it was also tempered by relief and a sudden epiphany on Felonious’ part.
There but for the grace of Money and many passports go I.

ENDS